JACK BROOKS: MONSTER SLAYER
**1/2
On paper, this premise sounds like it could be kind of funny: Joe the Plumber, fresh off the heels of The McCain campaign, is re-invented as a monster ass-kicker, taking on both Harryhausen-esque creatures and Robert Englund as a blobish, tendrilled troll puppet! Even more appealing: the director’s decision to retroactively embrace the camp and grue of yesteryear by refusing any digital effect! For a modern horror film made on a shoe-string budget, this is remarkable. Imagine: no CGI, just the polyurethane, karo syrup, foam rubber, paper mache, tubes, strings, and zippers from days gone by! Truly a decision worth supporting.
…which is precisely why it saddens me that Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer is so bad. The characters are a collection of stereotypes cribbed from a cursory reading of Joseph Campbell. But worse than that, they’re uninteresting! The sticky moments range from okay to wonderfully inventive, but good gore and awesome monsters are only enough to base an entire movie around if you take the Peter Jackson approach of heightening everything and proceeding at damn near the speed of light! There are too many scenes in Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer wasted as characters stagnantly argue about the same exact things indefinitely for it to ever be a Bad Taste or Dead Alive. Which is a shame because when it’s on point, it’s as gross as Street Trash and as magical as Clash of the Titans. I only wish it were on point more often than three seconds here or there, for about 1/3 of the special effects shots.
It’s as though there were some sort for elusive recipe for making the perfect cult film that these obsequious filmmakers were trying to follow. Take one veteran genre character actor with a devoted fan base, let him do whatever he wants with all of his scenes, add to him a cast of community theatre drop-outs ranging from great to awful, inject a fantastic nonsensical script and lots of make-up effects and voila! Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer.
The film is a lot better than most independent horror flicks, but that’s not saying too much. There’s enough in here for a really great trailer, but otherwise you’ll find yourself trying to pay attention to the plot before fast forwarding to the exploding heads at the end. And, I never thought I’d say it, but projectile vomit is only so funny. If you’d like the latest in contemporary monster tom-foolery, gore, and camp, then ditch this effort in favor of higher budgeted, yet more savvy flicks like Slither and Planet Terror. Director John Knautz shows promise and might have a successful career yet, but screenwriter John Ainslee needs to spend some more time editing for his scripts to fly. I’ll leave you with a quote from the LA Times review of the film: “As a horror comedy, it boldly declines to scare or amuse.” Harsh, but true.
- Jasper Oliver
September 24, 2009
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